Not sure if that would be useful but you could use similar approach to recently posted https://send.firefox.com/ that encrypts content before sending it to server using key that is in # param and is never send to server by browser.

Unfortunately, that would make it hard to provide various features server-side, such as code highlighting, and would require JS on the client (and also break raw file downloads, etc). It would also make the editor plugins much more complicated (right now they just POST to an endpoint).

We think that not listing pastes, having them expire soon by default, etc is a good compromise, as we don't claim perfect privacy, just that pastes are always sort of "unlisted".

First: these are awesome, and thank you for sharing.
(Esp. Spa.mnesty.com - that's hilarious and incredible at the same time)

I tried timetaco.com but it's not doing anything. I tabbed my way through the day (it filled in today's date - 2017, then 8, then 10). I select 5 : 10, which is about 3 minutes in the future, and then clicked 'Generate'. It just changes the date (all three parts) to red, and doesn't do anything.
(I'm clearly missing something - what am I missing?)

Thank you! It depends on what you mean by "often", I guess often enough. I use Pastery all the time (especially the editor plugins), and all my developer friends love it too.

I guess people use some of the other services too, for example I get lots of comments for Spamnesty. I don't really care enough to look, though, as I built them for myself or because I thought they'd be fun, or because I just wanted to make something with a friend.

For me its a bit of a balancing act... You produce a project which is successful means you need to devote time to it. But to devote time to it you need to provide support, updates, etc. If your projects doesn't earn money or you are forced to work on something else it becomes difficult and then you whish people will not use it. Most troublesome are student projects who pm you.

I tried to create a timeTaco countdown for today, but it didn't let me? AFAICT, it only allows for blast-off dates in the future. Also, a little clarity about time format (12 vs 24) and time zone would be nice. Overall though I love the simple UI.

Tell me about it, I looked shortly after we launched Pastery and saw 100,000 pastes and was ecstatic at the response, but then noticed that some were spam. I deleted all the ones that had spammy terms, and was left with 53 pastes :(

Most of them are just weekend projects, and took two or three days to create. Then I spend the odd few hours here and there. I also go to bed very late, which gives me ample time to work on stuff during the time when everyone else is asleep.

I just saw this thread, and honestly it is probably too late to get noticed by many, but I'm attempting to 'unsuck the web' with my project[0] by pinning "sticky" website elements where they belong - i.e. the website header shouldn't steal your screen real estate and scroll down the page with you.

My project/uBO filter list removes the "annoying" elements noted above as well as other "features" of websites (e.g. social share bars, cookie notices, etc) through a filter list that works with uBlock Origin.

I update the list often, and admittedly am probably entering into an arms race but I'm just really sick of websites hijacking (what I think) the web was built for (information).

Feel free to subscribe to the filter list by pasting the URL below[1] into the 'Custom' section under the '3rd-party filters' tab of uBlock Origin.

This filter list also works on mobile Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin installed.

Could you add/did you add killing the annoying "call to action" pop-up dialog? You know, you visit an article and BAM! A fullscreen modal asking to sign-up for their book newsletter? That would be awesome.

Also, the exit intent pop-ups. I, most of the time, just open a tab and switch to a different tab to read the current one later and then that Pop-up comes. It just annoys the hell out of me.

Even sometimes I don't pay much attention to it and when after reading other tabs I come back to this tab; all I see is that pop-up standing there, asking for attention. It even makes me forget why I even opened this tab in the first place and makes me leave immediately.

Oh man, so annoying. Here's my immitation of the thought process of the marketing team that designed it: "enter your email address so we can continue sending you offers and adverts and all kinds of information on that thing that you clicked on that we are now blocking with this popup preventing you from reading even though you're just passing by".

This is great. I wonder though, how much could you achieve just by creating 1 blanket rule: change every instance on a page of "position: fixed" to "position: absolute" - layout and nav should be more or less the same, across the board, but nothing will follow you down the page!

Kryptonite would be sticky footers, but if you're on a site that uses those you should just close the tab anyway. :)

Unfortunately, cosmetic filters that don't target a specific domain have performance implications[1] so I try to make every filter specific to a domain.

That being said I do have a few generic cosmetic filters as part of the list (you can see them near the top of the list) that don't target any specific domain but I don't use the "position: absolute" rule on any of them.

For example I'm working on one site now where a modal lets you sign in (which involves selecting from or searching through a long list of third parties) and if it wasn't a modal it would have to take you to a new page which would be a poor UX.

So long as they're not used for those awful "sign up for our mailing list" purposes, have been set up to work well on all browsers and viewport sizes, and are accessible, I think they can be okay.

A new page is the correct UX design choice and with HTML5 features can make the experience seamless and far less jarring than a modal that needs heaps of testing to get right across all browsers and screen forms.

But that was essentially my original point. Modals, when used by sign up to spam are annoying. When used to do anything else they're essentially trying to replicate a desktop experience that quite frankly isn't required of a website - even on "web 2.0" or full on web applications.

Also, please link an example of a modal done well across all browsers / screen sizes. I simply have never seen one in the wild that works better than an inline page element would have.

I've been using a bookmarklet approach (named "FIXEDFIXER") that aggressively changes all `position:fixed` and `position:sticky`[0] to `position:static`. (I've posted the one-liner code a couple of times before already, can repost on request)

Quite often the stickied elements disappear entirely, possibly hidden below other elements or outside of the window--I've never felt the need to check where they go.

Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements. I could've set them to `display:none` or removed them entirely and I think it will still cover my use case perfectly.

I don't think it would be so terrible if `fixed` and `sticky` would go the way of the blink-tag. Except that people would probably reimplement it with JS at expense of performance, because they like nagging people at cost of UX.

[0] it used to be just `fixed`, but `sticky` is used for the same webdisease

> Which kind of illustrates my point; I hope your filter list is a whitelist, because in 99.9% of cases, absolutely nothing is lost from these sticky elements.

My two cents is to automatically apply, but make sure to have a notice when it actually changed something. The only thing worse than a site not functioning correctly is when it's only not functioning correctly for you, and nobody has any idea why, including you.

- "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly)

- "Is it just my train, or are many trains running late?"

- "What was the on-time performance of this train like yesterday? 2 days ago? 7 days ago?" (Some trains tend to be chronically late)

It may come as a surprise that the backend of the system is actually not a database, but Splunk (http://www.splunk.com). DBs are nice, but Splunk is fantastic when it comes to data analytics and reporting.

I'm currently waiting for Splunk to make some of their machine learning modules available for free so that I can start pulling in weather data, train the machine learning component against both that and the train data, and use that to predict the likelihood of any given train becoming late.

Super easy automated machine learning in Python. Fast enough to run at production speeds. I'm the author, and would love any feedback you have! The whole point of the project is to make ML available to people like you who just like building things, and think their thing could be better with a bit of ML.

I write math texts that are Free. It is my creative outlet. My Linear Algebra (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra) has gotten some traction (and I get a small amount of money from Amazon). I also have an Introduction to Proofs: an Inquiry-Based Approach (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs) that I find helps my students, but is in quite a niche area. And I'm working on a Theory of Computation.

The reason I'm asking this question is because I realized something recently. I've been a programmer all my life. I used to love programming in Delphi, VB :P, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc since school. I created all sorts of stupid things like Winamp plugins[1], Graphics software[2], Games, etc. It was programming just because i liked making the computer do things for me.

But then somewhere along the line my projects started making me money and then I start reading all these marketing books and my perception changed. Now if I'm creating a site I'm usually more focused on SEO, list building and crippling my software so that I can extract more money from my users. I am making more money but the joy of doing it is gone. I feel bored writing software and generally browse HN and reddit and generally force myself to work.

Maybe it's time to go back to the basics and work on stuff just for sheer joy of doing it :D

I think this is the worst thing about startup culture. Don't get me wrong, I like startups, but there's so much hype and so much money around them that it sucks all the oxygen out of anything else.

I can't count the number of times I've been talking about an interesting project idea and heard "oh, so it's a startup!" Or worse, been talking to someone else about their project idea which they immediately follow with "and then I can turn it into a startup!" whether or not it makes any sense at all.

Recent history is littered with ideas that started as an interesting project, turned into a startup for no reason, blew out into some hypergrowth social unicorn, made no money, and then folded, taking the original project with them. Looking at you, Readability.

Entrepreneurship is fundamentally creative, but not all that is creative is entrepreneurship. Startups are a specific structure for a specific kind of project. Trying to cram every idea into that mould strikes me as the business equivalent of "I just learned about NoSQL and now I want to use it for EVERYTHING".

So what is the definition of startup from your perspective? I mean, if I have an idea and just build it, wouldn't someone else take the idea, build it, and look for VCs to make it profitable? In this case, isn't it better to always look for the possibility that my idea can actually catch on?

Hi, a software developer here. I also feel like you. Started coding very young, then uni, first job, first team leader position, then moved to Europe for 5 years working in big companies ( and saving as much as I could). Now I'm back home in Latin America. Built a couple of houses cash with savings, got married.
But I'm bored so I spend my time playing with my 3d printer and home automation little projects in my spare time. I don't think I will last much longer working on something I don't enjoy.

Every month I save enough for living at least 3 months (4.5k USD ) without working which is quite good, but on the other hand, I don't like what I do. It's tough to quit when you know other people are struggling to pay for basic needs in other areas.

I guess my plan is to keep saving and at some point next year ( when I get around 2-3 years worth of expenses) do something about it.

On the gamedev subreddit, it seems most questions are around how to market and get exposure for your game, SEO, making a successful kickstarter, etc.

It's great to take a step back and just make something that people enjoy, even if it does not bring any income. Getting "fanmail" or seeing the # of hours someone has put into something you've made is a great feeling.

I have a largish open-source portfolio, including a markdown parser, a regex engine, some music synthesis, and some more researchy stuff like a font renderer and a prototype of concurrent text editing using CRDT's. I'm lucky to be working at Google where I get paid 20% time to work on this, but the motivation is definitely not money.

The biggest item in my portfolio is xi-editor, and I confess I'm wrestling with some of the questions raised in this thread. I think it has the potential to be a serious player in the editor space, with extremely high performance goals (including fast startup and low RAM usage) yet a modern feel. It also has a great little open-source community around it who have been contributing significant features.

Yet it's at the point where it's _almost_ done enough to use for day-to-day editing, and I'm hesitating a bit before pushing it over the line. I think I'm scared of having lots of users. It's also the case that I'm very interested in the engine and the core of the UX, but the complete product needs a plugin ecosystem and along with that ways to discover, upgrade, and curate the plugins (including making sure they are trustworthy, lately a fairly significant concern). That's potentially a huge amount of work, and it doesn't really line up with my interests.

I'm wondering if it's possible to focus on the parts I care about and try to foster the community to take care of the rest, but I'm not quite sure how that would work.

If this were a business and I had some way of making a few coins from every user, then my incentives would be lined up to make the best overall product possible, including the less fun parts. But that's off the table; among other things, there are a number of good free editors out there, and the niche for a better but non-free editor is also well occupied.

Kind of feels a bit weird to be considering if/how/etc to commercialise it personally, when it would potentially be considered Google's property (?). Even though you're clearly the main author as per its commits & README.md. Then again, I have no idea how Google looks upon that kind of thing, so you may be all good.

With the "it'll probably get a million users quickly" thought... hmmm... depends if you're thinking to leverage Google's reach in some way. If so, then yeah it might have a better than even chance to happen. :D

The thoughts on commercialization are a hypothetical. As I said in my original comment, it's off the table (though I gave other reasons than being employed by Google). I'm just saying that if there were a revenue stream, then I'd be incentivized very differently (and more in line with what users need) than purely as a labor-of-love open source project.

And yes, if there were a good reason to, Google could bring considerable resources (including marketing) to bear.

B) Because if I build out my full ambition, it would be better by most objective metrics (speed, features, integration with IDE-like capabilities) than all the free editors out there, and I think there is a real demand for a better editor.

I know what you mean about the struggle for traction. It is of course possible I'm massively mis-estimating the potential userbase.

While I'd never heard of xi-editor before now, I'm definitely among those who yearn for a "better" editor for (first off) MacOS... and I think there are many others, based on my totally unscientific assessment of the currently popular editors. I'm still on TextMate for a reason. :-)

So my point is, for certain things "build it and they will come" might work fine. If I ever find an editor I like enough to switch to then I will be singing its praises loudly on the Innernets.

Right, I didn't write clearly. After a couple months of pushing to a 1.0, I'd expect maybe a few thousand users (this seems reasonable to me because it's the number of github stars). That's enough though that I'd need to start worrying about the product rather than just the technology, but that could all be done part-time.

My estimate of a million users is what might happen after another year or two of building out the whole vision, and with organic growth from numerous sub-communities (for example, I'd expect Rust users to be quicker to adopt it because it's in Rust). At that point, it's clear that the project would need at least a full time person to be its maintainer. And I don't see how to sustain that.

Thanks for emphasizing the focus on marketing; it is indeed a knob I can turn.

1. Why should want to switch if I already have a text-editor?
2. Reading through, there seems to be an emphasis on clean data structures and interfaces. Have you taken a look at Kakoune? Because your text editor seems to share quite a few design decisions with it.
3. So, there doesn't seem to be any mention of novel UI/control features even in the front-end. Is that a deliberate choice to emphasize the technical aspects as the selling point (or is it lacking/outdated in documentation), or are there just not any in the first place?

1. If you're using an Electron-based editor, I imagine you might not be entirely happy with performance. I can fix that. 2. Yes, have looked at Kakoune, and even have some plans to emulate its keybindings. It's an interesting project. 3. I'm not sure novelty is the main thing people need. I think we pretty well understand what people need, and there's something to be said for just doing a good job delivering it.

It's a wiki of all the info you need to drive your own vehicle around a country, continent or the world.

Border crossings, paperwork, insurance, gas prices, camping, drinking water, safety... it's all in there for a massive number of countries in the world.

I'm driving around myself, and it occured to me there is so much info out there but it all slides off the front pages of blogs and forums or is buried in facebook posts. Every three months people re-write and re-post the same stuff because they couldn't find it in the first place. The idea is not for WikiOverland to contain all the info, but at least link directly to it.

I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research".

It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on:

- fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs

- cleaning up the UI/display

- moving onto a "real" server framework

- writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data

- making an API?

Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!

Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much of it would be of general interest).

Yeah, I know it's not particularly fancy, nor does it involve any clever coding tricks or interesting features. However, it's literally the only community on the internet dedicated to the series, and one I've decided to run for a minimum of two decades to make sure said franchise finally builds a decent fanbase.

Is it going to make money?

Probably not, given how the franchise it's based on sells about 2 million copies worldwide at most, and hasn't gotten a new game since either 2013 (WarioWare) or 2008 (Wario Land).

But it's one with a passionate audience that up until recently had nowhere online to discuss the series nor anywhere specifically dedicated to their favourite franchise. So I decided to change that by setting up and promoting a community based on it, with the guarantee I'd keep it open for decades in the hope that eventually a community at least the size of the Earthbound one comes about here. With the hope that eventually I won't need to run the forum because there'll be enough sites about it to sustain a decent fandom.

That's cool. I can admire a dedicated Nintendo fan site. I ran Mario-Kart.net for a decade. In its most popular days it was #1 on Google for "mario kart". I let the domain expire recently since the site was outdated and I don't play anymore but it was a good long run. We had a dedicated forum base for a while too.

FWIW, the site design is really nice. I like the brown, and the use of all-caps for the site name.

And of course 5 seconds is how fast it should be :P

EDIT: Wondered what constructive criticism I could add, in case it was useful.

I guess the one thing I'm thinking of that isn't there is a cert tree breakdown, showing the cert structure in an easy-to-read format (which can be done xD), showing the trust root used, etc etc. I'm also reminded of all the little incidents that have happened with different SSL providers, and wonder whether people would appreciate seeing "you're using XYZ cert provider, here are controversial things about them". A feature like this would require careful presentation to work at scale though. Now I understand why you took the "go/no-go" super-simple route!

I also discovered (after noticing the fun URL query approach you use when you type in a domain) that disabling JS results in a white screen. That's common nowadays, so no comment.

I love it, way to go! You should submit it as a "Show HN"
1. You should charge for it. Maybe after a month of monitoring or something.
2. Give more actionable responses. Maybe some links or directions on how to fix the issues.
3. Can you make any money on affiliate links to paid certificates? If not, direct people to Letsencrypt when their cert expires.

I did not have the idea of creating an emulator, but some time ago I got curious as to how games were made for the GBA, so to try that I made a small Pong game [0]. It's really fun to play with 'old' technology from our childhoods.

I work on the PureScript (http://purescript.org) compiler, tools, libraries and book in my spare time (along with many other unpaid contributors), because it's the programming language I wished had existed when I started creating it. It's still the closest thing to a perfect environment for web development, at least as far as I'm concerned :)

Another big thank you from me. I used PureScript to learn functional programming. For me, being able to read the resultant Javascript made a big difference.

Also, I have to say that your code is lovely (both the PureScript code and the Javascript). Every time I think, "I wonder how this works/should work" I take a quick glance and within a few minutes I have my answer. I will start reading the compiler code when I get some time.

Yes people here are just awesome. When i made this thread i never expected so many responses. It's a huge motivation for me to see how so many people are doing so many awesome things just for the joy of doing it.

Just wanted to say a big thank you for this site. I used it when trying to figure out how to hook up an RFID reader to the Pi. It was suprisingly hard to find the pinout, but finally found your site. This is what I put together: https://bitbucket.org/kruffin/rfid_play

Oh, wow! I used this website as a reference fairly heavily when getting started with RPis, and still use it quite often (the WiringPi diagram in particular came in handy many, many times as there a whole lot of pins to it)

- Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors

- Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed

Now does any of that really matter, if the service is moving books? No. But there's no appeal process, and no one to discuss this with.

So I'm not glad it happened, but I'm glad it happened early. I've always been hesitant about affiliate programs because of the lack of control (e.g., I didn't launch with it; only integrated it after many users said they wanted it so I could devote more time to it), and now that my concerns have been verified, I know I need to be more creative.

Honestly there could be a better way by reaching out to other companies that work with you and form some sort of partnership agreement. Then you could give amazon "the finger" simultaneously...if you so desire.

One idea could be to partner with publishers and maybe 10% of the time a user opens a new tab, the book placement is sponsored. Charge based on impressions, click-throughs, or by some other arrangement.

For users, it keeps the tool free and ideally—if the sponsored placements are good—introduces them to cool new books.

For almost a year, I've been writing a SEGA Dreamcast emulator called WashingtonDC.
It's slow and it doesn't play any games yet, but it can boot the firmware menu and display the animated "spiral swirl" logo.
https://github.com/washingtondc-emu/washingtondc

https://f5bot.com - Social media monitoring. It can email you when your keyword (e.g. company name) appears on Hacker News or Reddit. I don't have any plans to monetize it. I just made it as a small fun project.

I built https://suitocracy.com very slowly over the last few years. It is for collating information on the ethical conduct of large corporations, as well as rating and ranking them on various criteria.

It'll never make money, but it has been a good project for me to modernise my web development skills which had gone rusty over the preceding decade. I also took the opportunity to learn NGINX and a few other things that I hadn't really been exposed to beforehand.

Nice work! I've always wanted something like this but as a browser extension for Amazon. On each product it would insert a box that shows how ethical the company behind this product is. Could also show things like how sustainably it was made and if it wad made in a sweatshop etc.

I made Plain Email [0] just because I couldn't find any email client with clean work flow without distractions. I use it pretty much every day. Thinking about open sourcing it - just can't find the time to refractor it nicely.

I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity.

Is anything beyond professional embarrassment stopping you from open-sourcing Plain Email as-is? It looks really nice.

I'm not on a Mac currently so I can't test it. What does 'defer' do?

I also do 'inbox zero' but I don't really find Gmail to be too distracting. The one thing I keep wishing for tho (in any email client) is a default ordering/sorting of unread emails by date-time received, but in a descending order. I'd love to see how hard that would be to implement with your project!

I built + maintain todolist[1] which is a GTD-style task management app for the command line. It's getting a bit of traction now which is pretty fun. It got a ton of upvotes on Product Hunt which was really cool to see[2].

I have very loose plans to monetize via a paid subscription for syncing with other devices / phones, but there will always bee a free / open source version as well.

I think it started the same way batch files did -- although of course shell came earlier. "Hey let me put the stuff I type in a text file":

mkdir foo
cp myfile foo/
ls foo

"Then I don't have to type it over and over". The "interpreter" was probably a 20 line function inside the interactive shell, or maybe just a single if statement to redirect stdin from a file and not a terminal.

That started sometime in the early 1970's. Along the way, people added loops, conditionals, functions, various hacky expression languages (test/[, find), many external utilities like sed/grep, full-fledged languages like awk/make, etc.

And today we have on perhaps 50 million+ machines an unbroken chain from 45+ years ago.

It's kind of amazing... If you can somehow score languages by how old they are plus how widely used they are, shell is probably #2 behind C.

C has had a ton of effort that has gone into cleaning it up, deciding upon semantics, standardizing it, evolving it. Shell has had POSIX, which was like 30 years ago, and that's about it.

It doesn't have to be a full project, right? Do random drive-by PR-requests to open-source projects count?

A few months ago I ended up scratching an optimisation itch for weeks, trying to figure out ways to make the lz-string[0][1] library faster and smaller. Near the end I went a bit nuts with trying out what works, methinks (nested trees built out of arrays and such), but I had a lot of fun.

It's not even my library, nor did my PR request get accepted/rejected yet. It did however make the compression up to 2x to 10x faster, depending on how well the data compresses.

And hey, I now have an intuitive understanding of LZ compression that I never thought I'd have!

Since a few days I've been working on writing a component for idyll[2] that lets you embed p5js sketches[3]. Progress here[4][5].

Staring into space can occasionally be useful: I just remembered that I nearly forgot about this. I just replied (as you may have already noticed).

Thanks for the info. I'm not quite sure how much investigation I'll need to do, but I can see alphabet-based token sizing being very useful for pure string compression, yeah. XZ seems to be a really flexible format but, unless I'm mistaken, it seems that implementations (such as the `xz` utility) seem to lean toward "one size fits all" instead of packing in+maintaining a "batteries included" basic (or maybe even extended) set of transformations/optimizations. It's kinda sad.

Everything to do with cryptocurrency! I wrote trading bot that was actually making a small profit - and then the exchange got hacked and took all of my coins & dollars with it :(

I've started to get into Ethereum and Solidity recently, but mining even a few coins just to have gas money costs more in electricity than they're worth. I'm letting my desktop mine anyways, but when I reach my pools payout threshold in a week or two (it's got a 3-year-old GPU), I'll probably kill the mining. (I know I could just buy some ETH with USD, but that's probably even more expensive and somehow feels different.)

(To be fair it hasn't been all negative - I bought a copy of the game Portal with the first bitcoin I ever earned, and a Kindle with the second bitcoin. But looking at it from a strictly money perspective, I'm definitely in the hole. In theory, it will be positive eventually.. but I'm still not sure exactly how.)

I one quadrupled my capital with a betting bot running a martingale strategy. Then I made it run overnight and lost all the funds. Turns out there aren't any betting strategies that can last over the long run.

With a martingale strategy the chances of losing are miniscule but if you play 10,000 rounds at a 0.01% of losing, you're going to lose once. And that's when you lose all your capital.

No, but over the long run, no betting system can guarantee a positive return. If you run enough simulations, you will inevitably lose. The Wizard of Odds[1] did a great piece on this and it's definitely worth a read.

Also, if you believe to have a betting system that does work, VegasClick[2] runs a $30k wager against your $3k if your system can survive at least 11 of 20 200,000 round games. It's easy money.

http://www.penginsforeveryone.com - giving away stuffed penguins. Just because we can. (Hoping to actually register this as a nonprofit, but right now it's basically a completely unprofitable business venture.)

ETA: On the development end this has been a pretty great project for my fiance and I. He built (and I'm learning from his efforts) a database for processing requests, filtering by priority, etc., and then an integration that allows those we want to send to be exported to a file we can pull into our stamps.com account, and that creates drafts of the Wordpress posts that power our map of sent friends. The database is pretty big (we're sitting at about 21K requests right now on a shared hosting platform) so some of the work has been to load the requests asynchronously so you're not waiting for 21,000 rows before you can manage requests...

Based around an idea of IO pipes with minimal semantics (duplex, reliable, ordered) that they can then extend to implement other traits like IO buffering, atomic send, packetization, compression, encryption, etc. [1]

This then allows merging together pipes of different types (by attaching the output of one to the input of another), which combines their traits and yields, for example, a reliable datagram carrier with in-flight compression.

With this it also becomes possible to write a simple IO bridge [2] that relays both data _and_ operational state between two pipes. The bridge in turn can be used to implement all sorts of interesting things, e.g. proper TCP relay, SSL tunneling proxy, TCP trunking proxy, etc.

I run/develop/manage a private MMOARPG game server for a dead game called Hellgate: London that we call London 2038. You can see more about it here http://london2038.com

Not only do I not make money on the project, it actually costs me money! :)

I have seemingly undying motivation to work on it, knock out bugs, release patches, catch cheaters, etc. The community being so active and excited helps keep me going. I probably spend 30-40 hours of week on the project.

I guess I do ask for money for this, but it's pretty overengineered and I wrote it knowing that nobody wanted or needed it:

Long ago, when Sun workstations were new and exciting, I wrote a simple Roman numeral digital clock, which just showed the time in Roman numerals.

My friend, instead of admiring my cleverness, said "But that's not how the Romans told the time" - which is true. The Roman day started at dawn and finished at sunset, which meant that day and night length were different every single day, as well as in cities at different latitudes.

Several decades later I did something about it, and wrote it up as a mobile app which showed either the modern time or optionally the Roman time.

Then I made it use the Roman calendar, where you don't have individually numbered days of the month, but count instead how many days until the next Kalends (start of the month), Nones (fifth or seventh day) or Nones (thirteenth or fifteenth day), even if it occurs in the next month.

Then I thought I might as well go all the way, and spent more money than I would ever earn from it on having the help text translated into Latin, just in case any ancient Roman time travellers wanted to use it.

I started this as a Twitter game a few years ago; it felt like a compact idea with a good hook. Earlier this year I automated it- so it picks its own words and collates the stories on the website itself (mostly successfully).

It doesn't have a big following, but the people who play are passionate about it. Some people play every day, and the most prolific author has written ~650 of them.

I've seen people get better as writers, some experimental stuff (like an improvised longform story built over many daily prompts), and occasionally I see a microstory that knocks it out the park. That makes it worthwhile.

A way to motivate people (including myself) to exercise with a chat bot that tracks your progress.

Originally built it to track how often I worked out, and if I didn't, what the reason was and have that reported back to me regularly. Now I have a bunch of people using it, but as you can imagine, makes me zero dollars. Well, technically it costs me money so it makes me negative dollars.

Been working on https://www.findyourtennis.com since 2011. Amateur tennis league/tournament management. 3 leagues have been using it recurrently for 3 years here in Montreal. The managers, volunteers, save dozens of hours every season.

Started off as a 'find a tennis partner' forum however getting traction was difficult. Chicken and egg problem. Slowly migrating to solving problems of league and tournament management. Will drop the forum one day. Long transition to do part time.

Now working on a mobile version with cordova. Testing it on the league I am managing. Saves us a lot of time since it automates lots of tasks and avoids the use of Excel.

I don't expect to make money. Market is small and problem is tough to solve. UX intensive. However fun to do on spare time.

My objective is to launch on the app store in 2018. Then I hope lots of leagues around tue world will use to simplify their lives.

This is my current project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209. It's too long to describe in a sentence, but, it's essentially what I call it the mother of all software (internally). I created it out of pure annoyance towards many of the popular services such as Wordpress, MailChimp, Hubspot, Shopify, Unbounce who had screwed up some aspect of their tools. So, in essence this is a combination of all those softwares under one roof.

I've been working on it over 3 years now, while trying to jump from one web framework to another. Finally, I've settled down on Phoenix. This project alone has helped me learn so many programming languages and also helped me gain more experience as a programmer in general, while simultaneously being able to integrate new tools and platforms into my pipeline - This is how I learned React, VueJS, Brunch, Google Cloud, etc.

At the moment, I've built this only for myself, just to support and test out my startup ideas. I am thinking of open-sourcing it at some point, at least the core functionality.

But as of now, there's nothing else I enjoy doing on a weekend than working on this project :) (also why I'm still single)

Late arrival to this thread. One of my projects involve working with local female co-operatives in Nepal and help them sell their hand made products around the world. Paypal doesn't operate here, merchant services for international cards are impossible to get. They don't understand technology in any way and there is a lot of hand holding.

We make no money off of this, I operate it at a loss, but each and every sale gets more money back to the women who really need it; a few extra dollars here and there can really make a huge difference in Nepal. The interesting part is they make more money on each sale through us than they do locally or selling through Fair Trade channels.

I have a similar website with similar concept (for Filipino products). However, I would strongly suggest you find a way to make it a sustainable business for you as well.

It sounds nice that you do not take a profit from it but the reality is that your life will change and one day you won't have time for a project that makes no money/operates at loss. Those women will start to rely more and more on the income from your website and this would be really unfortunate if one day this revenue totally stops because it was just a volunteer project for you. The more sustainable it is for you, the safer it is for them.

This is great! My smaller siblings say the wittiest things (often without realising) that brighten my day, I often wonder if there's a platform to 'record' them. I hope that your project will eventually turn into that!

Hmm, I'm suddenly struck by a realisation that I check Instagram everyday for therapy purposes (mostly following art and whimsical stuff.) Sometimes the whole "world is going dystopian" thing is just overwhelming; I can imagine a lot of people loving some light-hearted reminders like your Kidisms :)

Building https://tuiqo.com to try and solve a document versioning problem. We realized that even though we created a new way to do document version control and avoid "v1.doc, v2.doc, final_final.doc" problem; people won't switch to it because of lack of options such as formatting tools or any other pure editor features. We are thinking of possible pivots we could try out and we obviously don't have a product-market fit.

I built this dead-simple "image enhancing" app (http://en.hance.me) to focus in on potentially embarrassing details in photos. It allows you to specify a zoom area and create a 4-panel stacked image that progressively "zooms in" on your target area.

I have made no money off of this. In fact, I've probably paid hundreds in hosting/domain fees. But I love what I've built so far and use it everyday with my friends. Please check it out, I'd love to hear any feedback!

Pretty fun, don't get to do much back end stuff so its a learning process. Its creative commons so can't make $ off it but the $10/month digital ocean box is doing fine. About 100 players on at peak and always games going.

I have created a free site containing extracts from OpenStreetMap data. Unlike the metro extracts sites (Geofabrik, Mapzen), my goal is to extract specific datasets such as buildings, schools, hospitals, fast food restaurants etc from OSM rather than standard map/gis data.

My overall goal is to make the extracts available, and then to encourage people who use them and get value to actively update OSM to improve the quality of the data they are interested in. By doing this, the overall quality and coverage of data in OSM should (in theory) be improved.

Global Ping Statistics - https://wondernetwork.com/pings
We have ~240 servers world wide, we get them all to ping each other every hour, and record the results.

We've been generating them for years, they're a pain to store, we've made $0 with it. But I really like the data we're getting. We recently moved a lot of the legacy data into S3 to save our own backup & restore process ( https://wonderproxy.com/blog/moving-ping-data-to-s3/ )

Well, we went with the datastore we knew, MySQL. So on the upside we've got full granularity forever. On the downside we were backing up the full dataset every night. Plus the large amount of data was slowing pages down (even on indexed queries).

Now that we've moved the data older than two weeks over to S3, and query with Athena our site is faster, and we're not treating our backup infrastructure quite as poorly.

The biggest ping time I see is just under 4 seconds. With milliseconds, that translates into a 7-digit string if you pretend the first 4 digits are the integer part and the last 3 are the fraction. The caveat is that you must store "42.32" as "0042.032", someone more advanced may be able to suggest a better system. The maximum 22-bit value is 4194304, which is a tad small. 23 bits is 8388608 - and I suspect you'd consider an 8388 millisecond ping time a bug. :D

64-bit time is a fad just because it's easier to do multiples of 8 than bitpack. However, if you use 33-bit time, you can count up to 8589934592, which is the year 2242.

I see you have 250 servers. Using a single int will only get you up to 255. Ouch. But using two bytes gives you space for 64000 servers you'll never use. Wat do?

Well, if you're okay with calculating the avg and mdev in realtime, that's (23*2)+33 (min+max+date), which works out to 79 bytes. So you could prefix _9_ bytes for the server ID, which gives you 512 servers.

So that's 9+23+23+33=88 bytes per ID.

At 88 bytes per ID, one year's worth of records for 250 servers is 192720000, or 183MB per year.

This is not a particularly fancy approach, and is likely inefficient in many ways. But it's definitely doable, both for long-term (full-resolution/granularity) archival and realtime querying. You could make a superfast server in Go that accepted simple queries and handled the on-disk format. You could export the Go server over the Web directly (Go is pretty concurrent, but requires 8K per goroutine, which adds if you have eg 10ks of connections...) or use a simple/low-level protocol from your existing Web framework.

It was VERY surprising for me to find out that one of the most popular programming languages offers little variety in terms of BT libs/clients. For a long time, if one needed advanced options like DHT or protocol encryption, his only choice would be jlibtorrent (JNI wrapper for the well-known C++ library). Well, not anymore :)

I'm writing a bot for cryptotrading without having the proper knowledge for something like that. Learning as I go and I expect to lose some money on this (certainly won't give it a budget to manage that I can't afford to lose), but I'm having a ton of fun entertaining the fantasy that I could 'game the system' with my bot

https://programmingpodcasts.com - it's a directory of software dev and related podcasts. Haven't ruled out monetising it and to be honest maintenance is almost zero as it runs on autopilot. I'm it's biggest user, use it everyday.

I'm also in the process of writing a GDAX (https://gdax.com) Elixir library but won't open source that until it is more complete. I'm using that and Taex in a cryptocurrency algo trading platform I'm developing.

Movim, a social network project built on XMPP https://movim.eu/. I'm working on it for 9 years already and starting to have a nice little community using it daily.

I'm really enjoying developing Movim on my free time because I'm still motivated to show the world that we can have decent social-networks and IM solutions by using existing standard protocols (and not proprietary silos like today).

I started working on iparklikeadumbass.com. The idea is for me to upload pictures of people parking like idiots, blur the license plate and just have it out there. I know I wont make any money of it but it is a good way of preventing road/parking raging.

We have a fledgling train system in the Gauteng area of South Africa (this area includes Johannesburg and Pretoria). However, the only way to see train schedules is via a PDF (2MB) buried deep on their website.

This was a quick weekend hack to show when the next train is for each of the stations, and some additional info.

Https://github.com/Thorium-sim/thorium - Starship simulator controls. Think Bridge Simulators (like Artemis) meet D&D. The controls facilitate doing space missions, where one participant is a game master and the others take various roles on the ship.

I love working on the controls, and I’m learning a lot too. I’m going to start taking donations soon, but don’t plan on making a ton of money.

I built https://www.liquidityapp.com/ over the summer of 2015: "Liquidity is a smartphone based currency built for Monopoly and all board and tabletop games.", and I actively maintain it. I have enhancement ideas too, but I barely have any time to put into it these days so it is primarily just maintenance.

It's one part Android client and one part Scala backend (though there's some Scala in the client too). While I'm fairly pleased with the UX and UI I was able to create (given that I really don't consider them my speciality), the backend is the bit that keeps my interest now. That uses Akka, Akka Persistence (i.e. it's event sourced), and Akka HTTP among other things. The clients communicate with it via websockets.

The details aren't exposed to users but it uses public key authentication so as to not burden users with passwords/PINs. Each app generates a keypair when first used, and QR codes are used to make changing account ownership simple.

I'm hoarding profile data diffs from a well known social network. Been crawling every single user for the past 2 years and saving the changes. Had to stop doing it last month, after storage costs became too much.

Can you share any of the techniques you use to avoid being blocked for scraping?

Interesting to hear that storage was too expensive. I'm sure you could find personal sponsors here who would help with funding in exchange for access to the data - even with a 'no commercial use' type of restriction!

I find it fascinating watching the changes made to news articles over time. It lets you get into the mind of the various journalists and editors at different news organisations and see how they react to things. I just wish I had more time to develop it further.

https://github.com/bcruddy/taco - a create-react-app + redux + express boilerplate. It currently grabs pricing data for BTC, ETH, and LTC and I mostly put it together for myself about a month ago.

https://github.com/bcruddy/GramLikeCam - my Panthers' fan friends seem to enjoy it. Initially I wanted to write a bot that would grab new instagram posts from Cam Newton and translate the weird characters he uses into plain english and post it as the first comment but ended up going pretty much the opposite direction.

https://github.com/bcruddy/tumbo - a very unpolished ascii video chat to play with websockets and string compression, I'll occasionally check out the website and see someone live streaming a day in the office.

It's not-for-profit but I've met lots of amazing people. I've been able to use my skills and knowledge to help many of them and many of them have used their skills and knowledge to help me. It's fantastic...:)

I built an automated prank call system called Insultron a few years ago. You simply send a text message to 765-444-4442 and it will prank call your chosen friend with some randomly generated ridiculous insults. At one point a few years ago I used it on Steve Wozniak since he was a big fan of prank calling back in the day (pro tip for contacting Woz: his personal phone number is in his autobiography, but in order to get through you have to have a caller ID that’s in the same area code.)

It used to cost me under five dollars a month using Twilio but its usage has taken off dramatically (completely organically) and now it cost me closer to $50 a month but I keep paying it because it’s fun.

I also built and ran an implementation of Cat Facts several years ago until that was shut down by my provider because people are abusing it too much.

I'm working on https://theymadethat.com It's an IMDB for everything, not just movies. It does show you who built what but it does more: theymadethat can show you what they used to build it, what those things are made of (parts, ...), their evolutionary history, who they worked with, and so on

I can't say that I'm building it out of sheer joy; it's more out of obligation. There are so many people who's contributions to mankind should never be forgotten. Wikipedia is great (and I see it being complimentary to theymadethat in the long term), but we need something more. I could be wrong but I strongly feel that theymadethat is the answer.

This is super interesting to read through, and was very happy to see the Pentax K1000 mentioned! That was my first camera and I used it all the time during my teenage years. The thing was a beast, you could own the same one for 30 years and it would never die on you.

4. 100 - This is a project I started to learn to solve Algorithms and DS problems for my interview preparations. The plan was to solve at least 1 problem everyday for 100 days. But I couldn't do it everyday. Still whenever I solve a problem I put it in this repository (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/100)

5. Desktop Commentary - This is again a linux utility which shows Cricket scores every 10 seconds on your desktop as a Notification Bubble. The problem I was trying to solve here was to avoid going to Espncricinfo website every now and then to check scores when a match is going on (https://github.com/sunilkumarc/desktop-commentary)

Yeah, I don't recall where I saw something that suggested fair use. https://lop.parl.ca/ImportantNotices-e.html#Copyrights doesn't speak directly to that issue, but it's probably easier to just cite my sources and not bother with the revenue side of things. It's more important to me that this data be freely and easily available than it is for me to turn any kind of meagre profit.

...because it tracks all my thoughts, plans, & resulting to-dos, and I mark them off when done ("archived") in a few keystrokes. Then there is a simple feature for displaying the ~"journal" for a date range which defaults to starting yesterday at midnight: everything created or archived in that time is shown, so I've basically stopped keeping track in any other way, of what I have done, as I can always look it up.

I used to use org-mode, "inspiration" (an old windows program for collapsible outlines and mind maps), and various text editors, but this is the most efficient and flexible I have found. In my use, it is like a textual, ever-expanding comprehensive mind map that is highly efficient to use from the keyboard, uses postgresql, and can handle large amounts of data, having the same thing linked in more than one place, etc etc, so you can organize all possible stuff in arbitrary ways to suit yourself: I tend to use a few hierarchies and some frequent categories go in multiple places, for convenience. I use it to keep lists of gift ideas, calendar, personal journal, and it just gets the job done with the lowest impedance of anything i have tried or heard of. It has an auto "journal-generation" feature, some finicky import/export features to html or to/from text, searching, somewhat limited file storage, and more.

It has no mouse or mobile support yet, but it is the best thing I've found for any kind of note-taking (I'm the author). It needs simpler installation and added features but is stable and works really well, really efficient once you get familiar, and everything is on the screen. I hope to add anki-like features in the future. Contributions welcome. I'm told it needs an introductory screencast, which I plan to put up eventually, but for now there is a tutorial at the web site, on which feedback is welcome.

The latest code is in github, where I am working (very slowly) on an infrastructure for linking or exchanging info between instances.

That's...everything that I program that isn't part of my job. A near-universal trait of my hobby projects is that they're basically things that I don't think I could sell. The two that I've put the most time into over the years are an NES emulator and an attempted reimplementation of the Ultima Underworld game engine.

There are also things like a C++ port of some Python code to control a PWM-generating chip (inside the skeletal codebase that will eventually control a quadrupedal robot), and a collection of utilities that mostly have to do with things related to DOS-era games.

This started as more of a statistics page for the service interruptions published by the Metro on their website, which I scrape. The slight tongue-in-cheekiness of my website, which opens up with a large text saying something like "XX days since the last disturbance", where XX is usually a single-digit number, made it become mildly popular (at least in terms of what I'm used to).

This particular subway system doesn't operate on a fixed schedule and doesn't show the ETA for the next train outside of the platforms nor on any app or website. (Google thinks there's a schedule, but they've been fooled.) They also don't publish usage stats for each station, which would be of great interest to everyone who likes daydreaming of expansions, network reorganization and the like. Furthermore, I read and heard multiple reports of delays and interruptions that never made their way to the website. So I decided to build a Android app to unobtrusively crowd-source data and communicate the service status back to the users...

...and the very ambitious goal is to, one day, be able to calculate train positions and ETAs based on real-time data reported by the smartphones of people riding the subway. Pretty much "Waze for the Lisbon Metro".

Yeah, I've put months of work into this and there's absolutely no business plan; it perpetually feels 5% complete. But it's been fun putting together my second Android app, playing around with Postgres (after many years using MySQL), designing the REST API and writing the server in Go. I plan to use this big project as my sandbox for experimenting with machine learning and other AI techniques, as well as data analytics and visualization. There's already a small but extremely interested group of users, which really motivates me to keep working on this.

Eazy.bike picks best bicycle stations considering real-time information of how many bicycles and free bicycle stands are available in more than 400 cities in 48 countries. Behind it uses machine-learning to predict what will be the availability of empty slots so that you can maximize the probability to find a place to park your bicycle.

It took me a huge work to write the whole stuff, API, Android, iPhone and web application, but I really like it.

Kiwix itself is not my project, I just packaged it for Sandstorm. I saw Sandstorm as a great potential tool for the off-the-grid, mesh networking, etc world. Being able to easily host a local copy of Wikipedia was one missing piece. I hope to work on the next piece soon.

I started a blog (this week) focusing on how retail investors can get exposure to startups and other private companies, which are normally reserved for VC and institutional investors.

The ultimate goal is how can we, as startup employees and enthusiasts manage our own risk? Since we are heavily exposed to risk in ways other players in this space aren't (because we work for one company at a time, and they invest in many).

1. http://index.psybernetics.org A news archival service.
Built on a Golang implementation of another project. Intending to open source the backend once it's mature. It's been running in production for around a year but the underlying httpd now either needs vendoring or the code sat on top of it needs updating.

2. https://github.com/lukeb42/emissary The first news archival service I wrote. Went through a couple of iterations. Not too happy with the multi-process model under the hood though.

3. http://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd This has been running in production for a couple of years. The scripting system was recently overhauled and we're using it instead of Consul or NATS for message bussing and service discovery at work (I technically get paid to make sure this is production-quality but it's not consuming time at the moment). It'd be nice to use the plugin system to implement a MUD as a channel mode that generated the world via numpy-based LSTM network.

I've spent about a year building out AmaranTime (http://store.steampowered.com/app/566800/AmaranTime/), mostly working on movement mechanics. I actually just made a breakthrough, so soon players will be able to run in place to move without having to press and hold a button. While it is for sale, I haven't made much money. Besides, I do this for fun!

Created a simple Twitter bot back in 2013 that auto-tweets every post marked "Show HN". Updated to HN API (Firebase) in 2014 or 2015.

Small claim to fame: Had a daily email newsletter for the first year or so. Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt) was on my initial subscriber list, before PH launched. Now if only I had just pivoted to feature new wow-ness for the world PH-style, hmmmm ...

I work on Empires Mod, a 10 year old real time strategy and first person shooter hybrid. It's playable for free and still has an active playerbase. It's very satisfying to fix bugs that have been around for more than 5 years.

We're currently looking for someone that can do UX design, if you're interested in making an impact on a live game send me a message.

Created Unfollow (https://www.unfollow.io) because I wanted to know who unfollowed me on Twitch. Not a noble reason. But now that I don't stream anymore I just do it because it's so much fun and I don't care about unfollowers anymore. Lots of people use it which motivates me. It's free, but I'm looking for monetization strategies.

This is probably going to be buried but YES, my weekly newsletter The Random Roundup(https://tinyletter.com/randomroundup)
Granted, down the line I may be able to leverage the audience for something but right now sharing the gems I find while hitch hiking the internet is so awesome I'd probably even pay to do it.

It's very 'Unix-y' in the sense that it's supposed to do this and only this.

I created it because I wanted to have a way to make notes without being dependent on apps. With moncat, I can use any e-mail client to incrementally create larger text files.

Currently, I'm using it to write a journal in Markdown that is automatically converted to HTML. How that works: I e-mail journal entries to myself, put them in a mailbox folder, and periodically compile the journal using a cronjob.

moncat accepts some basic commands that you can put in the subject line of the e-mail. For example, you can reorder items to be concatenated. It also handles attachments and nested folders.

...

Yeah.. so there is no documentation and the code is pretty shit, since I'm the only one using it. The upside is that the code is also pretty small (around 350 LOC Python in total).

So, just in case anyone is looking for a tool like this... here you go! ;)

Ha! I love it. I just recently created a tool for personal use that does something similar to this.

I use Evernote notes with bullet lists as my TODO list. I created a tool that takes each line of a received email and adds it to my TODO list at the top. It is very convenient. My wife can email me things that need to get done!

Nice! I like that basically now you have an e-mail interface to Evernote. What I like about that is that you get all operating systems for free and crazy robustness in terms of forwards compatibility (at least, on the client-side).

I'm at a point where money doesn't matter to me anymore except in the sense of retirement. I'm not rich by any means, I'd just rather live a life working on the most important problems in life, which these days I believe are mostly political/economic.

I created the bitbox console, a DIY console for which I and a few others develop random games, which is starting to get some traction. The console is based on baremetal ARM cortex m micro. And then I ported a few 8bit emulators. Edit: added url http://github.com/makapuf/bitbox

I've been working to fill what I see as a gap in free software. My library encodes data into sound and works cross-platform. As far as I can tell it may be the most robust, cross-platform freely licensed library that does this, though there is still much I need to improve on

https://agh.io/about / TicTag is a passive time tracking tool that randomly samples your time to get a statistically accurate picture of your life. It's like RescueTime except that randomness allows it to be for everything, offline and on.

(How it works: every 45 minutes, on average, it'll send you a slack message. You respond with tags for what you were doing right at that moment, like "job dev" or "bike" and it compiles your responses.)

However, unlike other similar sites, the focus is equally on making it easy for students to use AND making it easy for teachers/mentors to use, adapt and create their own learning material. To this end, I am currently writing an online book as a "Teacher's Guide":

This is a project that started out 13 years ago as a free desktop application (http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/) and which I have been working, on and off, during all that time just for the joy of it and knowing that people have found it useful.

I'd hope the title explains the concept fairly concisely. It's a marble maze type game i.e. guide a marble towards a goal, stay out of traps. But the marble is quantum which means it looks more like a cloud and behaves nothing like a marble. This led to the levels looking less, well, maze-like than I'd hoped, but you've got to run with what you got, so I started bringing features into gameplay that wouldn't exist in a marble maze e.g. trying to fulfill multiple goals at once by getting orbits into a certain shape.

One thing you can say about my side projects is that they have been 100% out of touch with commercial reality (excepting a rock climbing website from the late 90s that made me a few k before I retired it)! I thought initially that some game studio might want to put money into developing Quantum Marble Maze beyond proof of concept into something more, but I guess either nobody has heard of it, because my promotion or delivery is somewhat lacking, or they're not that interested in something so experimental. Hell, even after open sourcing it I haven't had anybody contribute. According to the server logs only about 1000 people have even played QMM, and 10 people finished, which makes it considerably more niche than I had hoped for a project which tries to explain a truth "far more marvellous ... than any artists of the past imagined". Good thing I enjoyed the project for its own sake :)

I created it because I was annoyed with the lack of notifications provided by GitHub for some events like new people following you or starring/forking your projects.
A lot of people are now using it and that makes me happy even though I'm losing money by keeping it online.

Built a few things to teach myself new stuff, the ones that are still online are:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitmasch.b... - Wanted to learn a cross platform app framework. Built a simple game that would help my niece get better at basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Made with Apache Cordova. She only played it a few times, but her dad (my brother) ended up getting hooked on it for a while, beating other people's high score with 50-100 points every time someone beat his highscore.

http://p2pool.jir.dk - Wanted to get some experience in building a crawler and was interested in p2pool cryptocurrency mining at the time, so I built a p2pool crawler. The site does have adsense, but it doesn't really make any money.

I built a show tracker just for me (it's not nearly where I want it to be, so I don't share it anywhere, eg. currently my show database is out of date I need to see what broke my cron tonight. no ssl cert, no optimization at all I don't even know if my js is minified tbh, etc).

I am the only active user http://www.overseer.tv/user/smt and I built this because I watch a shit ton of shows and I often forget when premieres come, or what episode I left off on. My site is basically one click to mark a show/season/episode "watched" and I have a calendar and upcoming section, which is all I wanted from many other sites I tried before creating my own.

I host this on an EC2 instance for 29$ a month, and my own usage alone makes it worth it to me haha.

It's the latter. I don't know why it costs so much, this is the first time I have ever hosted anything so I didn't realize I was overpaying. The way it was phrased I thought I had a year free and then it would be 29$/month but they just started charging me immediately. I haven't had time to look into it. I'll investigate tonight, thanks for pointing it out.

All of my side-projects, and my blog. None of the side projects are that popular (few github stars, max is like 19 stars and that is technically just a blogpost..)

But I don't mind, I am doing them for the sheer fun of it. I get to hack around with fun things and feel good about solving some problem. I get much of the same joy from the job I am doing now, so I feel less guilty about not having as much time for side projects as I used to.

Some things I've done/am-doing for for the sheer joy of it:
- Pong for the Gameboy Advance
- Java Swing 'framework' (Just started to be honest)
- Python text editor

For my blog I mess around with other things such as:
- Sending keystrokes to Minecraft to 'cheat' (this was years ago)
- Dynamically building a GUI based on Model classes in Java (reflection hacks)
- Scraping webcomic sites to store the comics locally

But, as long as you are having fun, what does it really matter what you do :-)

https://poniverse.net/ is a nonprofit organization I built mostly for fun, to celebrate and support the My Little Pony fandom. It's a social project before a technical one, but I learned a ton about software development, server administration, corporate procedures, leadership, accounting, and myriad other skills through it. Being in the position to employ people might be interesting but fan sites aren't known for that kind of cash flow.

https://pony.fm/ deserves a special highlight - I had a dream fan music site in mind and wanted it so badly that I taught myself web development just so I could make it real. That experience was so awesome that it inspired me to pursue software engineering and computer science professionally.

I built a small website for some old groovshark buddies once that site died where we could meet up, chat, and listen to music together.

Its a collaborative radio, where users queue up songs in playlists, then rotate playing a song off the top of their list for everyone to hear. It was originally built as a stopgap until we found something similar but better, so we called it lifeboat radio. But it's kinda become our permanent home now...

I have a cooking/recipes website http://cookarr.com — it doesn't make any money, and I didn't even want to put advertisements there, because it's my stress-reducing project :-) And kind of a recipe book I made for myself (and others)

For the past year and a half, I've been organizing the Paris Ruby Workshop with a friend of mine. It's a monthly meetup where everyone is welcome to come and pair program on small katas, and chit chat over some pizza. It's free to attend so we don't make any money out of it.

It's always fun to meet people that we might not have talked to otherwise, since a lot of attendees are beginners who come from non-engineering backgrounds. And it's also a pretty good feeling at the end of the evening when people tell you they had a good time and learned of to program a little bit better.

I also found it surprisingly easy to setup : grab a few katas from exercism.io, create a group on meetup.com and find a local startup willing to host and provide free pizza in exchange for a bit of visibility in the community, and you're good to go.

I just started a few days ago, I'm making VST plugins that emulate sound chips from old consoles / computers. (There is also a weird vocal synth in there). Currently working on a C64, hope to have it done tonight.

I have been making https://www.klubi.si/ sporadically over the past many months (it was meant to be a weekend project, but it never ends there...). It's a map of sports clubs in my country.

The idea is to help people find klubs nearby, as well as provide a basic internet presence to those klubs whore founders don't have the time or knowledge to create and maintain a website, or even a Facebook page.

The website works by volunteer revision of data, as well as twice a year email reminders to founders to review the data. This helps ensure that the data is the most up to date as possible.

Unfortunately, not all klubs even have a public working email address, so thinking of it, I could probably do something about as well.

Making a robot. It's fun, I look forward to making it every day and log my progress. So far it has depth perception and I have a goal in mind for it. It's an expensive side project though, I underestimated the price but you learn a lot about electronics in the process.

It's a big procedural crafting game. The long-term goal is to make a Civilization-like game set in a Minecraft-like world, with really good AI. It's also a testbed for a bunch of ideas I've developed about massive, virtualized simulation. What that means is that you could in principle have thousands of cities with millions of individual inhabitants going about their business. But it's sort of analogous to lazy evaluation in that things are only computed if they would be perceived by the player, or need to be consistent with past information the player already knows.

I have two project which make zero money but I love doing them. I learn so much from writing code for them and use them as a playground to try out and apply new technology in a production environment, Yes, they are production environment because they are severving real customer, just that no one pays me so far.

I started a podcast with another Hacker News poster. We have no ads, make no money, but it's great fun just talking about big local events in Columbus Ohio, and also big tech news. It's obviously extremely niche and local, but there's always something new happening in urban development, politics, that sort of thing here.

Basically it's a guitar/bass fretboard where you can select a scale and a root note, then it displays the notes of that scale on the fretboard. It also has a bit of info about the scale, like the intervals used to build it.

Initially I didn't plan to publish it, but since it was barely decent I tried to put it online. I just spent a few bucks to buy the domain, but it don't cost me anything to keep it online, since it's just a static page and I use Netlify to host it. Btw, Netlify is awesome! Highly recommended!

Cool. You probably already know this, but note that R7RS-small [1] is the most recent small scheme (the spec is not too much larger that r5rs). There are enough similarities that it might be worth supporting it.

I built a very accurate value estimator for properties en Amsterdam for the sake of it. Then put it here amsterprice.com . It is slowly starting to pick up, but as itnis for free I am only watching hosting bucks go. Still proud of it! :)

Porting an ancient 6502 Forth to Z80. Nobody will ever use it and there are already loads of Z80 Forths around, but it's fun and forces me to learn exactly how a language that's always interested me works. Not on Github yet.

It's a database of roman stone monuments. We have 50000 photos of 27000 stones. The content is collected by two retired archaeologists who travel Europe in their Volkswagen bus driving from museum to museum. After funding for the project dried up, I volunteered to make the new website.

The page is in german, but the pictures speak for themselves. For example, have a look at this query for my favorite mythical hero:
http://lupa.at/queries/691886695

I created it initially just to scratch a personal itch (to make another project, https://alterslash.org, more resilient to upstream changes in HTML), and now get a lot of satisfaction just in knowing how much it's used around the world for all sorts of use cases I hadn't really imagined when I started writing it.

I wrote and use meditations ( https://github.com/ioddly/meditations ) to help me organize my day using the principles of habit formation. It's been pretty immensely helpful to me. Funnily enough although I never thought of monetizing it, assuming there wouldn't be much interest, there are several similar apps that seem to be pretty popular and doing well. I keep working on my own because it's a good learning exercise and I can keep my data encrypted, locally.

Encapsulates a kind of different Docker workflow. One where your Dockerfiles live in a separate area from your project. Includes a bunch of bash helper functions for common things the containers need to do like wait for other services.

It also provides a little Dockerized testing system using pytest - which I might eventually separate out. I am working more on the testing part these days. And I'm writing a book about some of this.

Trying to make it easier to deliver sample applications that run in your browser and include backend databases, jupyter notebooks, etc. It basically allows you to run Docker Compose environments in your own little sandbox + adds an online editor for modifying code/etc.

I can see it either going towards more guided tutorials or something more like glitch. Honestly, it's just been super fun to build.

I'm making a browser extension so that when users buy online with it installed, portion of the money goes to research-backed charities (no costs for user). It's a nice feeling to build something that has a possibility of improving someone's life. And 13 GBP raised so far! :))

I started working on it during my PhD as I was missing a wiki engine to organize my knowledge that run on a USB stick without installation, supports images and stores the content in simple text files for easy backup and restore.

Now I am using it every day in office for my personal notes on projects, running inside a TrueCrypt container. Meanwhile I added an Android App to sync the content on my mobile phone.

I like to create small tools that are optimized for me and my families use case. For example we used Google Keep for shopping lists, but I found it too bloaty and slow. So I created bös.se (it got SSR and websockets, wohooo!)

Do you have time to share any of your experience with the tools / process that enables you to get this done in a reasonable timeframe? I'm specifcally interested in how these have changed over time - how have changes to tools / process helped get this done faster?

I build simple products that helps my daily computer interaction, i never bother to publish them, the only one i published is a Chrome Extension to have an easy managing solution for tabs opened in Chrome. Published it only because some friends wanted to use it:

So every time this bookmarklet is clicked, a http request goes to your website, and then the code executed? I can see the possible use of this in super duper long javascript code, but why this trip even for simplest code?

An Android app for putting photos/text/sounds together into videos, with the key aim being to have an interface that is as simple as possible. Started as part of a research project many years ago, but now mainly a labour of love for the ~30k users.

The potential of AR is very exciting as I imagine it. I have been considering how I would like to see it implemented as an assistive instrument in my profession - k12 teaching. Teachers largely make traditional use of traditional tools in their lesson design and - especially - lesson performance. Sketching out needs and affordances is a fun kind of daydreaming for what-could-be, but it's not as serious a project as what others here are sharing.

I work on https://pisc.junglecoder.com as an exercise in building a stack based language that is a little less arcane than most that exist at the moment. It was inspired by Factor, Lua and Javascript, and is built in Go. I like using it for little tasks of generating bits of boilerplate code, and have some long term ideas around IRC bots, shells, and the like.

I enjoy eating out and trying new food, but I really do not enjoy having to spend a lot of time reading through reviews to figure out what the best dish is at a restaurant or even what the best food dishes are in a city.

So this is my attempt to solve the problem of deciding what to eat by allowing people to find and share food dishes.

I've been working on my chess GUI for over seven years now http://triplehappy.com. I've made a few hundred dollars in donations, but maybe 10 cents an hour is not why you work on something like this, it has to be a labour of love. I do wonder if I am going to be working on this for the rest of my life, there's always more to do....

Never planned to make any money out of it, I've made it because I needed it, and to play around with building a unix tool in C. It's pretty simple but it's definitely one of the projects I've had the most fun working on and I still have plenty of things I want to add.

I built https://mypost.io which I technically did as a learning opportunity and was planning on charging, but I'm keeping it free. I built it to teach others how to code.. using HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with hints of BB Code.

It is being used around the world.. never advertised it ever, except for the few times I posted on here and twitter.

I didn't create any of the fonts. When I discovered the original .com domain had been lost to squatters, I decided to grab the .net domain and go about hunting down and re-hosting as much of the original content as possible.

The original site was later restored at a different domain (linked in the sidebar).

built a slack slash command to spew out excuses (inspired bigtime by giphy) - mainly because I was unemployed and wanted to learn how the slack APIs work - https://xqz.es - I put a blog post together covering how it came to be [1] - also forced me to learn how to get Let's Encrypt certificates.

Also built a twitter stream reading android app [2] - it's butt ugly but was super useful while I lived in Beirut and there was the occasional bomb going off (at the time, that's kind of settled for now, and I no longer live there) - there was a lot i intended to do with it but just sort of... stopped.

Working on a project for connecting fans of the band Phish and allowing them to share and curate their stories... Paying out of pocket for minimal hosting costs, donation buttons all go to Mockingbird Foundation... Hoping to launch in the next month or so. Doing it because I am a huge fan of the band and the community and it's a huge part of my life I'd like to give back to.

Didn't make too much progress yet, but I am making a PHP web framework inspired by the one file codebase that Bottle.py uses and the structure (loosely) of Flask. I am a Python programmer that recently had to use PHP for work, if you haven't noticed :P

http://getpoe.com - distraction free / focus writing app for Windows, and soon Linux and macOS. It makes me nothing, but I love working on it. I built it to have a focus writer on windows 8 (there were none that played move with metro at the time) but I spend more time coding it than actually writing these days

I built a super lightweight web app to draw on images. It targets mainly cheap android phones that don't have storage for a proper app. It's called https://minimage.tk, and I use it all the time to annotate screenshots now. It was a nice pet project to build a progressive web app in full vanilla.

I wrote a children's picture book "The ABCs of Programming" to explain what I do to my toddler. Previously I was telling him "Daddy talks to robots". Hasn't made much money yet, but I launched only this week.

I've only spent 9€ to buy the domain as the application (django application) is on a shared server. I'm making 0 €$ from it, as it was made to solve a problem that I had while teaching mobile development where I teach.

A few JavaScript problems that you can solve and grade online (it's a static website). I haven't done any work on it recently. Added a few Amazon affiliate links originally, but they didn't make any money and Amazon has closed that account now.

I really wanted a t-shirt that said "Ladies Love Cool JPEGs" so I made it, and made a quick website to sell them. Here's the website in case you also like 90s hip hop references mixed with image formats: https://ladieslove.cool/

Essentially a map of where college students are over the summer, run by me and my friend. I work on it because I really love working with my friend, love that it connects people, use it myself, and enjoy programming in itself.

https://www.hnlondon.com - been running it for about seven years and had some amazing speakers give talks. Sets me back a few grand a year in sponsorship shortfalls, but is an amazing experience when a great speaker inspires the whole room.

Sorry- should also point out: It's a platform that lets you listen to music in sync with others through Spotify (like tt.fm). You can be a DJ, vote on the track, or star it for later. Has been super useful for music discovery and making internet friends.

Getting reasonably complex front-end programs running in a purely functional (Purescript) was really fun, and made me like the front-end for the first time. Been meaning to do a writeup of my experience when I have time.

My dad keeps asking me how I plan on making money from this project, given the amount of effort I've poured into it. He grew even more confused once I told him that a company called DataRobot raised over a hundred million dollars to build essentially the same product.

But it just brings me joy to make ML available to everyone.

If you have any feedback, please let me know! I'd love to know how I can make automl better for you.

Working on a pretty sick karaoke website as well as a jeopardy training application. I figured since both involve lots of copyright nonsense that it was best just to do these as personal labors of love.

https://shortmarks.com - Keyword bookmarks across browsers (I started using them in Firefox, and it was a pain to keep them in sync). It has about 1,400 users, much fewer active. I keep thinking I should rebuild it and figure out a way to make money from it.